It’s another year, another continuing resolution for the Pentagon as appropriators once again haven’t been able to get a spending bill in place in time for the start of the fiscal year Oct. 1 — but this time, there’s an additional casualty: the authorization bill.
Authorizers have prided themselves in passing the National Defense Authorization Act in time for the new fiscal year on a consistent basis, but with so much yet to resolve in the appropriations bill, lawmakers don’t think they’ll have an NDAA together until next month, and for appropriators it could take longer.
With the end of the month looming, Congress is hard at work trying to get a continuing resolution in place to keep the government funded as they resolve significant issues in the appropriations bill — most importantly, whether or not lawmakers can skirt Budget Control Act caps by replacing the cuts with supplemental funding, a highly contentious issue. That leaves authorizers in the lurch for the time being, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
“You don’t want to put out an authorization bill with all these different amounts,” Clark said. “If the appropriations bill doesn’t follow suit, you have an inconsistency between these two bills.”
That doesn’t mean the industry will have to wait too long to see an authorization bill. Clark said he thinks that by mid-October, even without an appropriations bill in place, authorizers will have a good idea of what will be in it and can pass the NDAA.
“They’ll know enough at that point what the lay of the land is going to be,” Clark said.
